I’m not eschewing intelligence gathering in foreign lands. I’m lambasting intelligence gathering here by our own government to whatever ends they deem “right” for themselves. I’m making an example by way of demonstration that foreign governments are increasingly seeing America as a usurper of sovereignty. Perform your intelligence gathering, but don’t make it so obvious as to be as plain as the nose on your face.
We are tracked by cameras on every building across every intersection, on every street sign and billboard. We are seen by digital eyes everywhere and at all times. Even in our own homes, the cameras attached to Internet-connected devices could be used to spy against us. How is that legal or promotional of our liberty? We can certainly do away with our smartphones in lieu of home telephones, but even those can be tapped and tracked. We can certainly do away with our televisions and our computers, but even our library reading habits are monitored. We could move to the country, set up an underground network of storage bunkers and safe havens against nuclear fallout or government tyranny, but drones will know where to find us, and a vast array of tools could be used to locate us and smoke us out of the holes we create for our own safety and well being. We could eschew every technological advancement of the last 100 years, and somehow, the government would know where we are.
There are no practical ways to blind the government to our goings on. How does that make us free? We are slaves to our own government tracking us, making notes. Certainly they could use living, breathing humans to follow us everywhere, “minders” if you will, but at least they could be “lost.”
Face it, there are no avenues for privacy left in this world. There are no avenues for private discussion with another person. What the Founders pulled off over 200 years ago will likely prove improbably in today’s world. No longer are oceans separating us and slowing communications. Everything is instant. Our only hope, and it’s truly just a hope not a practical plan, is that just men rule us and our chains rest lightly upon our shoulders.
God save us.
Where there is a will, there is a way. A computer is only as good as its programming.
I agree.
In my youth my father and the other neighborhood men would have not stood for the kind of spying that takes place today. They would daily shoot out the kinds of public cameras we find usual.
A Vatican representative recently said that the United States was encircled by an electronic barbed wire fence.